Chapter 1: What chaos is AI causing in the publishing industry?
AI use and allegations of AI use are causing chaos in the publishing industry. Some authors have had their books picked apart and their careers destroyed.
AI scandal that is shocking the book industry.
If you're wondering if it's AI slop, it is AI slop.
AI accusations are no fucking joke.
Some writers say AI is just a tool and they feel no shame about using it.
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Chapter 2: How are authors coping with AI accusations?
I'm Coral Hart and I write AI-powered romance novels that are topping Amazon charts.
So, is it that AI is soulless and could never replicate what humans do, or is it pretty compelling? Coming up on today Explained, a scandal, an experiment, and a question, can books survive the AI revolution? Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo.
Chapter 3: What is the story behind Mia Ballard's book 'Shy Girl'?
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Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part?
Chapter 4: What are the signs that a book might be AI-generated?
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Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look. It's in a book.
Chapter 5: How did the publishing house respond to the AI allegations?
A.I. Imogen Westnight, journalist, novelist, wrote about a recent massive blowup in the publishing industry for Slate.
So what happened was an author called Mia Ballard, an American author, self-published a horror novel called Shy Girl. And the conceit of this book is it is about a woman who is down on her luck financially and decides to sign up for a sugar baby website. In the hopes of fixing that, she gets put in touch with this man and enters his orbit.
And eventually he sort of kidnaps her and decides to keep her as a pet, like a dog in a sort of cage and on a collar and forbids her from speaking except to say woof and not to woof to actually say woof, which is a bit strange. There we go.
This is who I am now, a pet, a shape carved by someone else's hands, a thing devoured piece by piece until there is nothing left but obedience, the quiet and the hurt, until hurt is all that remains.
During the course of this incarceration, she starts to take on kind of animal qualities and finds herself actually seemingly turning into a dog.
I chose the man who wanted not who I was, but who I could become, a pet, a prisoner.
She self-publishes this book and it's popular among fans of self-published horror online. And then what happened was, as often enough happens these days, is that a big traditional publisher, in this case Hachette, will see a self-published novel and... see that it's popular and decide to then publish it again under the imprint of their own house.
And that can be a pretty good deal for the house and for the author because they get a book deal and a payment and the publishing house know that people like this book already and therefore it's likely to earn a profit. So they do this, they contact her. It then gets published in the UK by Hachette and is slated for publication in the US a little bit later than that.
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Chapter 6: What impact did the AI scandal have on Mia Ballard's career?
People begin to read this book more widely now that it's out with a major publishing house and discussion begins to pop up on places like BookTok.
The writing felt really flat. It felt surface level and underdeveloped, which could be a clear sign of AI usage.
I was just reading sentences and I was like, that doesn't even mean anything. And read it.
Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. Does anyone else think this was written by chat GPT? It has this very recognizable and constant rhythmic use of adjectives and similes that stinks of AI.
This conversation kind of gathers speed and people agreeing that there's something kind of off about the book. And then it all gained a little bit more attention. There was a user, a YouTube book person called Frankie Shelf, who made a three hour long video dissecting this book and all the things that they thought were... gave the signs of being AI generated.
It's so empty. It's flat in every way. Themes, characters, plot, writing. And that is because, in my opinion, large chunks of this book were written with assistance from a generative AI.
The New York Times then get involved and decide to run their own little investigation into the book, doing things like putting it through AI detecting software. and take that to Hachette.
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Chapter 7: How can readers distinguish between human and AI-written text?
Hachette then get off their ass as it were and pull the book and then the author Mia Ballard has issued very sort of sparse statements about this. She gave a quote to the New York Times saying you know that this is essentially ruined her life and her reputation but the interesting claim that she made was not that there was no AI in the book but that
potentially there was AI in the book because she had hired or asked a third party to edit the book. What do we know about the author? This is her second book. She published another, just self-published. And we don't know loads and loads about her because she's very much withdrawn from the public eye in the aftermath of all of this.
An extra layer to the narrative around all of this is that she's a black woman and therefore someone who is traditionally less interesting to big publishing houses and is afforded less time and attention. It would be silly to argue that none of the vitriol is linked to the fact that she's a black woman author. You know, I think there's like...
One ought to be careful about the way that we talk about this because this is someone from like a, from publishing terms anyway, certainly like a disadvantaged background who's been given this big platform and has attracted like a lot of flack for this potential use of AI.
You read the book. For your money, what made it so obvious that AI had been used?
There's like two layers to it. Everybody is becoming familiar with certain kinds of AI writing tells, right? There's things like negative parallelisms, that thing where it's like, it's not just this, it's this. Or excessive use of metaphor and similes, especially ones that don't quite make sense or that come very rapidly one after another.
Then the door bursts. Every noun having an adjective attached, certain kind of repetitive syntactical blocks that appear.
So there's all of that. There is all of that. But that on its own, you know, AI chatbots write like that because humans did once, you know, like it's an aggregate of all human writing it can get its hands on. So I would kind of think that that on its own isn't quite enough. That's what makes it so difficult, right? Because you can find that in human writing too.
But it is, and this will sound wishy-washy, but I think people will...
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for literature in the age of AI?
We have an author saying an editor must have inserted AI later on. You understand publishing a lot more than I do. Do you find it believable that that could have happened?
In a way, yes, because it's possible. I don't think it's possible for it to have happened without her noticing it. I think she must have known about it if, if, if, if a third party did. I mean, it sounds... Obviously, I have no idea. It sounds unlikely that it was done by a third party. If I had to nail my colours to the mask, I would think that probably it was her. Obviously, I have no idea.
But that seems like Occam's razor, most likely. But then it... ought to have been picked up when it went through Hachette.
The problem with self-publishing to traditional publishing pipeline is that because the book is complete and also because the book has a proven audience already, editors are therefore, maybe reasonably, they take the book in and they think, well, not much needs to be done with this because it's a complete work already.
It might not be as rigorous an editing process as it would be if just an unpublished first draft came in on an editor's desk. Another is that editors, unfortunately for everybody, including themselves, have less and less time for editing.
In the major publishing houses, people talk about this all the time within the industry, that so much more of their work in recent years has been given over to stuff that needs doing, like campaign work or liaising with authors. But it is leaving less and less time for them to do the work of editing because the publishing houses don't have enough staff and all these kind of bigger picture issues.
So where we've ended up here is that readers feel betrayed. A writer's career is more or less destroyed. Hachette looks kind of foolish. They do.
It makes you wonder whether anyone is talking about guardrails in place to keep this from happening again or whether at the moment it's just like we've got to wait until the sleuths on Reddit figure out that there's a soullessness to this thing and start asking questions.
Yeah.
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